Jewish Comedy

August 14, 2017
Yiddish expert Dauber pulls off the impressive feat of discussing humor without sucking the life out of it in this insightful and funny analysis of Jewish humor. He identifies seven strands of Jewish humor: responses to persecution, satires of Jewish norms, intellectual wordplay, vulgar and raunchy humor, ironic and metaphysical humor, folksy and quotidian humor, and humor about “the blurred and ambiguous nature of Jewishness itself.” He devotes a chapter to each, making clear the significance of their differences, and using many examples to demonstrate his points. Nothing is off-limits, and Dauber is a fine guide to laughter in the face of mortal threats, such as Israeli high school students joking that they will meet again on a memorial plaque or Holocaust victims discussing a reunion as soap in a shop window. In his section on parody, Dauber discusses how the Book of Jonah anticipates The Producers in its plot of “someone who tried to make a failure by doing everything wrong” but ended up succeeding. From the Book of Esther to Seinfeld and Rachel Bloom, Dauber has provided a comprehensive examination of his subject that could well be the gold standard for undertanding what people of any ethnicity, nationality, or political persuasion find funny, and why.

This audiobook grew out of the author's course at Columbia University, and it retains much of the analytical depth of its precursor without the dry stretches that plague much academic writing. Of course, any history of humor must include some jokes, and Dauber knows how to tell a joke. The stretches of history are mostly less funny, but those who aren't interested in history won't be listening to this, in any case. It's not a joke book. Humor comes mostly out of everyday life, and Dauber weaves the narrative of everyday Jewish life (from the Babylonian exile to the present) and the literary record into a story of why a nation laughed--and needed to. D.M.H. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine